1-on-1: In District 4 SB Council Race, Devon Wardlow Touts Broad Experience - But Downplays 6 Years of Work in Pot Industry
Liberal and loquacious, the pro-rent control, pro-housing planning commissioner says her consensus building skills balance the push for more housing with city's preservationist ethos.
Last week, Planning Commissioner Devon Wardlow entered Santa Barbara’s wide-open race for the District 4 city council seat with a campaign announcement that ran to 591 words.
None of those words was “cannabis.”
Which seemed a notable oversight, given that the 37-year-old Wardlow spent the past six years employed locally and around the state in the retail sector of the contentious pot industry.
In a Newsmakers interview, Wardlow for the first time in the campaign discussed her work as a public affairs executive and lobbyist for several retail cannabis companies, a background that has drawn grumbling among some local Democratic insiders. In 2019 and 2020, Wardlow worked as director of public affairs for Coastal Dispensary, and then spent four years as vice president for the statewide Embarc Cannabis Dispensaries — a job she left in February for a gig with a traffic safety company.
Mindful of deep community and political scars inflicted by county government’s past reckless push to make Santa Barbara California’s epicenter of cannabis cultivation, she contrasted the retail sector with cultivation, described the former as a local “success” and portrayed her work in it as a template for how she would approach an elected post on city council:
“I’ve never worked in cultivation,” she said. “My role was really focused on municipal ordinance development in dozens of municipalities throughout the state. And really the goal was — cannabis is legal from a retail perspective throughout the state — how do we implement this in a responsible and appropriate way in communities throughout the state?”
She added:
“So I would work with city council members and the community to really develop a super-regulated approach to ensuring that if cannabis is going to happen in your community, it’s done right and really tailored to your community.
“And I did that through identifying shared priorities with folks that really disagreed with the policy. And I think that’s a very appropriate and important part of crafting policy. So I worked with former chiefs of police, heads of youth-serving organizations, school boards — all through the lens that they were not supportive of cannabis, but they were supportive of addressing the illegal market and actively and meaningfully investing in youth drug prevention and education.
“I think that from a retail perspective, cannabis is viewed as a success, definitely. Santa Barbara was one of the first cities to move forward with retail cannabis implementation, and it was actually used as an example of how to do this in an appropriate manner. It was a capped market — three licenses with very appropriate zoning. So yes, I would say that retail cannabis has been a success.”
Personal experience. A UCSB graduate, Wardlow moved to Santa Barbara when she was 13 and has had a whirlwind career that includes a variety of experience, among it:
Government (Obama’s White House intern and Department of Labor aide)
Politics (campaign operative for Hillary Clinton and Lois Capps)
Tech (public-facing gigs at Facebook and Lyft)
Community planning (first appointed by city council in 2022, she remains the board’s most high-profile and ardent advocate for new housing projects)
When she discusses her desire to be elected to council, the fervent pace of Wardlow’s professional experience manifests in turbo-charged torrents of words — a verbal cascade that melds policy-speak, planning jargon, tech idioms and progressive political bromides with a spirited passion that animates her presentation and produces statements like this:
“And so I really believe that my approach of really working together, identifying those shared values and priorities, and then working to do the policy work to execute on that vision is how we ensure that any types of developments that we do are aligned and complement our broader goals around protecting what we love about Santa Barbara while also meaningfully addressing the challenges that we’re facing.”
Politics and policy. Pro-rent control and pro-housing, she enters the four-way District 4 race well-positioned from the standpoint of campaign organization, having won the influential Democratic Party endorsement and raised about $50,000 to date.
District 4 includes the Upper East, Riviera, San Roque and other nearby neighborhoods. Fifteen Tuesdays before the Nov. 3 election, Wardlow faces three rivals who have pulled papers to run: former city council member Jason Dominguez, corporate consultant Genevieve Taft-Vazquez and retired tech executive Monte Wilson (whose Newsmakers interviews are here, here and here, respectively).
In our conversation, Wardlow said her résumé reflects pragmatic skills in building consensus and forging compromise on complex and contentious policy matters — abilities she argued are well-suited for Santa Barbara’s political moment.
Via the State Street Master Plan and robust plans for new housing downtown, she contended, the city is poised for generational change, and her experience can help push it through.
“I really think it’s important that we focus, and we stop scaring people that we’re trying to put housing in high fire zones, full stop,” she said. “That is not something that I would be supportive of. I believe that we need to focus housing and do the policy work necessary to actually start to meaningfully deliver on the housing that we say we want to do by focusing in that downtown where I think that there’s both community support and political support to really make progress there.”
“From the state, we are being asked to build 8,000 units,” Wardlow added. “We are not going to hit those numbers. I think that if we can make the meaningful impact that the State Street Master Plan calls out — which is 1,000 to 2,000 units downtown — that would be substantial. And so I think we need to ground the conversation in what’s realistic.”
On the issues. In our campaign interviews, we ask all the candidates for their views on four key issues. Here’s what Wardlow said about them.
Rent control. “I do not think it will increase the supply of housing. I’m strongly supportive of it from the perspective that it is obvious and critical that we protect community members and that they can afford to stay here. The rise of rent costs is definitely not commensurate with the rise of wages … And I think that we need to use every tool in our tool chest to address housing affordability so that our community can stay the community that we all love.”
Budget. “I’m supportive of a residential vacancy tax … I think that through all the budget conversations that we’ve had, what has come out is that we’re not going to be able to cut our way out of this problem. And so I think it really has to do first with evaluation … And then I think it’s really the obvious things. Number one, consulting contracts. We need to really reevaluate those and ensure that we are not leveraging consultants for things that we as a community have a brain trust that we can probably do better … the second part is really identifying vacant positions … and holding those positions open for as long as we possibly can.”
State Street. Wardlow believes that all nine blocks of downtown State Street should remain closed to traffic and described the current scene as “vibrant.” As for future downtown development: “I’m focused on the maximum (height of new buildings) — to me that would be 60 feet. And I think that we can do this in a way where it can still really hold the architectural value and the charm and character that make Santa Barbara so unique … So I don’t think that we can’t meaningfully start to address and make good on the vision of the State Street Master Plan and retain the character and charm of Santa Barbara. I really believe we can do both of those things.”
Ranked-choice voting. “I’d be supportive of it. I think it really comes down to: are the voters supportive of it? So obviously I would turn it over to them to make that decision. And then I think it also matters what the cost of implementing it would be. So are other cities in our county supportive of this? And if so, I think that would be amazing, because then we can split the cost of implementing and getting it on the ballot. But yes, I would totally be supportive of that.”
Check out our interview with Devon Wardlow via YouTube below or by clicking this link. Our podcast is available on Apple, Spotify, or on SoundCloud. TVSB, Channel 17, airs the show every weeknight at 5 p.m. and at 9 a.m. on weekends. KCSB, 91.9 FM, broadcasts the program at 5:30 p.m. on weekends.
Newsmakers’ Candidate Conversations. To offer Santa Barbara voters early introductions to contenders for four City Council seats, including Mayor, in the Nov. 3 election, Newsmakers is publishing one-on-one interviews with the candidates over the summer. Upcoming interviews include candidates Ian Baucke, Cevin Cathel, Alexander Stoeber, James Zurlinden, Wendy Sims-Moten and Kristen Sneddon. Here is who we’ve spoken with to date: